Zoho Workplace helped Carnival Group streamline their communications on the cloud.

The Carnival Group of Companies

The Carnival Group, often synonymous with multiplexes in India, is a conglomerate with diversified business ventures that include Agri-trading, Food Courts and Cloud Kitchens, Automotive, Realty, IT consultation, movie production, distribution and more. Their offices are spread across different cities in India, Dubai, Singapore, and Europe. Being the third largest multiplex operator in India, Carnival has around 4000 employees in the cinema division alone, with around 500 operating screens.

The Communication Landscape

Carnival Group was using an on-premise software for their internal communication and had set up a private cloud for data and file storage. While emails were hosted on-premise, they did not have an official messaging platform, and employess were using WhatsApp for quick communication. Sasi Menon, one of the Board of Directors at Carnival and the IT Head, was primarily on the lookout for a trusted email solution that could scale based on the growth of the company, and an official chat app to clearly demarcate personal and official communication.

Choosing Zoho Workplace

Being head of IT, Sasi had clear requirements for the kind of tools he was looking for. On his journey to digitise all business processes, the first step was to find a reliable email solution. Zoho wasn't new to Sasi, but he weighed it against all other offerings in the market with regard to price, features, scalability, and found Workplace to be good fit for a growing company like Carnival.

Business communications in one place

Now, Carnival's official business communication platform is Zoho, and nothing else. When talking about his favourite part about Zoho, Sasi Menon says, "I especially like how I can use Workplace apps with our other business apps, a lego-based design as I would call it. I can plug in what I need to with the systems we have." This was important for him, as Carnival still hosts some of its business apps in-house, like the help desk software. With Cliq, the team is also able to streamline all chat conversations and calls, which was otherwise spread across personal messaging and calling tools.

Reasons to love Workplace

In addition to being able to use Zoho alongside their existing business apps, Sasi also says that it was good to have a Desktop email client. And whenever the team at Carnival had specific requests and enhancements, the Workplace team was quick to analyse and deliver. One more reason to love Zoho was the clarity in audio and video calls over Cliq. "The sound quality and experience is much better than other similar apps", adds Sasi. His other used apps in the Workplace bundle are Sheet and Meeting. Since the team is spread across locations, and some on-field employees may not always be in office, Zoho's mobile apps also came in handy.

In conclusion, Sasi says, "Zoho Workplace is the next generation communication platform, and has the ability to scale. The team is always open to requests and feedback. I just cannot compare this to our older systems."